Gregory Doran, the RSC’s artistic director: ‘It felt like a moment to take stock, to check where we are.’
Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

The Royal Shakespeare Company is to choose actors for its 2019 summer season who reflect the nation in “terms of gender, ethnicity, regionality, and disability”.

Gregory Doran, the RSC’s artistic director, said the plan was to assemble a consciously diverse cast of 27 actors for a season of three plays, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure. Each actor would appear in two of the three plays.

Doran said the project was building on diversity work they had been doing for some time. “It felt like a moment to take stock, to check where we are,” he said.

Casting for the summer 2019 season has yet to take place but Doran said he, along with fellow directors Justin Audibert and Kimberley Sykes, wanted to create “a company which reflects the nation in terms of gender, ethnicity, regionality and disability”.

The three plays will be staged in a reconfigured Royal Shakespeare Theatre that will extend the audience further round the stage at the circle levels. Doran said it would create “new perspectives on the action … showing our work in a completely new way”.” After Stratford, all three plays will tour to six regional theatres.

The diversity debate is one of the most urgent in the arts, with all publicly funded organisations in England under pressure from Arts Council England to make more progress. Its most recent annual diversity report highlighted “a large gap between organisational aspiration and action”.

The drive for greater diversity has led to accusations of box-ticking, which Doran vigorously denies. He said casting was never done just for the sake of it: “It is always what is best for the play.”

Last April, the Daily Mail theatre critic Quentin Letts accused the RSC of miscasting a black actor in The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, criticising what he saw as a “clunking approach to politically correct casting”.

The RSC hit back, accusing Letts of appearing “to demonstrate a blatantly racist attitude to a member of the cast”.

Doran will direct Measure for Measure, a play he has described as the ultimate #MeToo play, while Sykes will direct As You Like It, and Audibert will direct a reimagined The Taming of the Shrew, in which England is a matriarchy and Baptista Minola is seeking to sell off her son Katherine to the highest bidder.

Also part of the summer 2019 season will be productions marking the 250th anniversary of David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee, which launched Stratford-upon-Avon as “the epicentre of the Shakespeare industry”. There will be two plays in which Garrick had successful roles – The Provoked Wife by John Vanbrugh and Venice Preserved by Thomas Otway, described by the Guardian’s Michael Billington as a masterpiece and included in his book The 101 Greatest Plays.